magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

'So what's the deal with Dave.Z's birthday dinner?'

'Eight o'clock at Congee Village. Have you ever been there?'

'No.'

'It's on Allen, just south of Delancey. You can't miss it.'

Ran into Julia on the F platform. When we got to the restaurant there was already a sizable group of people congregating on the sidewalk out front and giving Dave appropriately junkstore-esque birthday gifts: a huge pile of postcards, little trinkets, thrift store t-shirts.

The decor at Congee Village is a little over the top, especially in the basement room with the disco lights that they stuck us. And the food is pretty authentic Chinese, in other words, not particularly vegan-friendly. My impulse, and it was shared by the two or three other vegans there, was to order the safest sounding thing on the menu, the steamed bean curd with mixed vegetables, which was not terribly exciting. The steamed bread though, which is also not terribly exciting, is something that is tough to find outside of China even thought it's served with nearly every meal there, and is something that I find myself craving on a fairly regular basis.

We drank, we laughed, Dave smashed a piñata in someone's parking space. The kids on bikes headed off, and I took the train home, while everyone else want the opposite direction out to Brooklyn and Queens.